The
Johnny Depp Zone Interview
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‘If I could morph my face, that'd be great.’

by Libby Brooks
The Guardian
January 11, 2000

Johnny
Depp, the beautiful and otherworldly star of Sleepy Hollow,
is
living
a real life fairy-tale, as Libby Brooks discovers

Even
in close up, there is a whisper of the elsewhere
about him. As the camera molds itself to his delicate beauty, what is
Johnny Depp conjuring: the anarchic literacy of his Beat heroes; the
barfly tempers of a Hollywood anti-icon; the smitten second childhood
of a new father? Or is he listening to the Clash?

The
tiny earpiece transistor was Marlon Brando's suggestion: Depp first
used one on the set of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
his
bravura homage to Hunter S. Thompson. Depp chooses music appropriate
to character: most recently harpsichord works for Ichabod Crane, the
reluctant leading man of his latest film Sleepy Hollow.
But he
usually ends up listening to rock. "There's nothing consistent
about a movie set: there's hammering, there's this, there's that, but
I have total consistency. I can sit and dream and listen to the
music."

This
is being Johnny Depp. Is he for real? Do you want him to be? On
balance, I would rather have imagined him. Apply the rigors of
reality and he slips away like a dream from wakefulness. His voice is
soft and low, his speech trips and strains like a bird learning to
fly. He tends towards moonstruck meanderings that mean everything and
nothing, like: "As human beings we break something down to try
to understand it, and by breaking it down sometimes you can kill the
magic. If there's something that just works, for whatever reason,
don't question."

He
is describing his relationship with Tim Burton, the darkly wistful
director who presents almost as much of a conundrum to the movie
business as Depp himself. Theirs is the success of altered states.

Sleepy
Hollow, their third collaboration, following Edward
Scissorhands and Ed Wood, is an
adaptation of Washington
Irving's classic American ghost story about a small community
terrorized by a headless horseman. "I just know that there's a
deep understanding that the two of us can't even begin to talk about.
There's a deep connection, and I know that anything he wanted to do
I'd be there. I just hope he gives
me . . . another job." He laughs,
perhaps recognizing how ludicrous his final comment sounds.

There
are some obvious deductions to be made
from Depp's
choice of roles. With the exception of Scissorhands
and Donnie
Brasco, he has never starred in a commercial hit. His own
directorial debut, The Brave, was slammed at Cannes
in 1997.
He has consistently played characters on the outskirts of convention:
the cross-dressing B-movie director (Ed Wood), the
shuffling
man-child with blades for fists (Scissorhands), the
delusional
seducer (Don Juan DeMarco).

"I
do have a strange fascination with damaged people, of which I'm one;
Christ, who isn't? And I remember very well that feeling in my early
teens of being an outsider. I'm not sure it's so much feeling like an
outsider as just clearly not being an insider." It is obvious
that 36-year-old Depp recalls the awkward sensibilities of youth as
the rest of us remember yesterday.

There
are many people who act in life, he says, especially as outsiders.
But the roles found him, he insists. It was not a conscious
dedication to the maverick—for that is a convention in itself. It
is the "true pedestrian way" of his literary hero Kerouac.
It is equally the final retreat of a scared child.

He
describes a violent and explosive family life. Born in Owensboro,
Kentucky, his parents fought constantly and moved 30 times before his
father finally left them when Depp was 15. He dropped out of school
to pump gas and play guitar. He drove to LA looking for a record
contract and wound up an actor. "When the homefront went into a
tail spin, you needed to believe that somewhere, somehow, something
was going to be OK. You had to believe that you just keep moving
forward regardless and you'll get to a place where you can breathe
better."

Do
we create for our children the childhood that we wish
we'd had ourselves? He talks about his baby daughter with raw joy. He
wants "to create everything good" for Lily-Rose, born last
May to Depp and his girlfriend Vanessa Paradis, the French singer,
actress and former face of Chanel. Before he has even voiced the
thought, invisible strings are tweaking the corners of his bow lips
upwards. "I knew that it was going to be deep, even
life-changing, but I didn't have any idea that a person could love
that deeply. And when I love—my mother, my family—I love deeply
to the very core of my being." Love is an odd thing to
calibrate. There is a sweetness to him that would be cloying if it
were transported beyond his dreamscape.

"When
she arrived . . ." he pauses. "I knew her, looking into the
eyes of this little angel,"—he mimes holding her—"this
little thing that is going to know you deeper than anyone will ever
know you." He's like an adolescent begging to be taken
seriously. He's exposed like a butterfly in glue. He invites one to
pull his wings off, then cauterizes the impulse to cruelty.

Now
based in Paris with Paradis and child, he wants "a simple,
normal life". He would prefer Lily-Rose not to go into acting.
"Nobody puts money into a film because they love art, they do it
because they want a return on their money, so it's kind of dirty."
He laughs testingly, like a child telling a smutty joke. "I've
made a career out of commercial failure." But he doesn't feel
like a failure. "No, not at all, because it's none of my
business what the movies make in terms of money, and really none of
the money's going to me." (Depp earns a reported $10m per
movie.)

So
what is the difference between commercial success and the kind of
success that he enjoys? He doesn't know. But he is very successful.
"In an odd way. Luckily, I've been able to stay afloat. I don't
know why that is, because I made choices to go down another avenue
that was not particularly solidly paved for you already. But it was
the only way I could go, believe me.

All
this is easy to say, if you're Johnny Depp. Responsibility would fade
the magic. He finds himself believable: but that he is wholly genuine
doesn't make him any less created. He has the sort of excessive
beauty that is best understood in still-life. He is exquisite like an
object, with the undeveloped charisma of a teenager. He is too
bloodless to be sexually threatening. And he is adored for it.

He
loathes it. Since his early elevation to sparker of teenage dreams as
an 80s TV star, he has deliberately mauled his pale heart face on and
off screen: with make-up, masks, itchy stubble. "I despised
being a product. Not only is it limiting but it's frustrating,
because you have nothing to do with it. I'm much more obsessed with
the idea of the truth and exploring than I am with creating an image
that I can package and sell to people."

Does
he find his looks are a distraction?
"It's a
distraction for me." A delicate, observational player, with a
fine comic talent, Depp has often been described as a character actor
in a leading man's body. "If you have a leading man type look,
they expect you to be a leading man, and I find that impossible."
It begs two questions: would he be where he is if he didn't look that
way? Could Keanu Reeves play a failed film director with an angora
fetish, as Depp did in Ed Wood? "I want to attract
as
little attention as possible. If I could morph my face for the night
it would be one of the greatest gifts I'd ever be given. To be gawked
at and treated like some kind of novelty . . . that's really an ugly
feeling."

During
the filming of Sleepy Hollow, Depp confronted a
gaggle of
paparazzi who were waiting for him outside a London restaurant. "I
said, ‘I don't want to be what you want me to be tonight,
we're
celebrating something special so let's just say we'll do this another
time.’ And they were aggressive, they said we're going to get
the
picture so why don't you just pose for it. I'm not going to pose for
anybody." He sounds like a man for the first time.

He
picked up a plank of wood and hit one photographer on the hand,
threatening the others. "Nobody took a picture," he
concludes, grinning dopily at the punchline: "Not until the cops
came.

"I
don't regret that at all. I was invaded, and I have to protect what
is mine, and keep it as pure as possible."

During
the interview, Depp kept returning to a "deep" passage by
American playwright and novelist William Saroyan that, he said,
encapsulated the values he hopes to pass on to his daughter. He
became frustrated at his inability to quote it verbatim and promised
to fax me a copy. I dismissed this as professional friendliness and
didn't believe him.

When
I returned to the office, there it was, with an accompanying note:
"Here's the Saroyan piece that I butchered for you today. Hope
you like it, it is everything to me." It was a genuine, human
gesture from a young man with an obviously good heart. The passage
itself is one of those Desiderata-style invocations that one makes
one's motto before circumstance shakes the innocence out of you.

Johnny
Depp is a star. He is as much dreamt as dreamer. Reality militates
against him, so he remains in the fairy-tale because he can. Would
you want him anywhere else?